Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Facebook to Acquire Oculus

After acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp, Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, for a total of approximately $2 billion. This includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock (valued at $1.6 billion based on the average closing price of the 20 trading days preceding March 21, 2014 of $69.35 per share). The agreement also provides for an additional $300 million earn-out in cash and stock based on the achievement of certain milestones.

Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has almost remained an entirely mobile-only experience. That changed when the service was acquired by Facebook and they brought the profile page. Now, the company announced the ability to view the service feed on the web; by logging to your profile you will be able to view the latest photos posted by the people you follow as well as you can like (and double click to like) and comment on them.

“In fact, our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go. However, to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community, at the end of last year we started to expand to the desktop web, giving you the ability to see profiles from instagram.com. To continue that path, as of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web – just like you do on your mobile device”

In a press conference at its California headquarters, Facebook has unveiled “Graph Search,” a search engine allowing users to search for content on Facebook such as news posts, status updates, photos, locations and more. The service does make sense for the network massive base of 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections. Graph Search is currently in closed beta.

“Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page, when you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. You can edit the title – and in doing so create your own custom view of the content you and your friends have shared on Facebook.”

“Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: ‘hip hop’) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: ‘my friends in New York who like Jay-Z’) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses.”

After being acquired by Betaworks, Digg redesign has gone live, a result of a very rapid 6-week redesign process. The new design is simpler and cleaner, it emphasizes top stories, popular stories, and upcoming stories. The new Digg score system will take advantage from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to rank stories. The front page of Digg will also features editorial stories instead of relying completely on the Digg engine.

In the blog post, Betaworks says that it intends to continue to add new features:

While today’s launch is a milestone for us, we’re more excited about what’s coming next. In the subsequent weeks and months we will:

introduce network-based personalization features (like we do in News.me) to make Digg a more relevant and social experience

experiment with new commenting features

continue to iterate Digg for mobile web

move the website forward with features like the Reading List, different views into the top stories on Digg, and more data to help users better understand why a particular story is trending

launch an API so that members of the development community can build all the products that we haven’t even thought of yet

In addition to the website, Digg also has launched a new iOS app, which offers a similar news reading.